Week 5
Meditation Talk Transcription
Welcome to ‘Release Into Now’, week five. Chanting and mantras.
Chanting meditation is a beautiful and technically helpful form of meditation to practice. Essentially what this practice is is meditating and repeating one word or one phrase over and over and over. The word or phrase that is repeated is called a mantra. That mantra can be anything. It can be a word that you find meaningful to you or it can be a phrase that you find meaningful. It can also be a sound or a phrase that has no meaning whatsoever, but simply resonates with you. The main idea of chanting meditation is to repeat this word or phrase over and over so that it creates like a windshield wiper for the brain. Breathe in, and on your exhale, you say this word or phrase and again, breathe in and exhale, and repeat this word or phrase over and over. What happens is that it gives your mind something to focus on. It directs your consciousness towards a one pointed mind in the sense that all you’re focusing on is this word of phrase and repeating it. This works as a scaffolding in some ways as an attempt to keep your mind shielded from other thoughts coming in. A lot of people use the word ‘om’ whenever they chant (which can be spelled OM or AUM) and is used and seen frequently in Hinduism and Buddhism. The sound ‘om’ is said to be the resonating sound of the universe. An interesting thing that I found in chanting mediation is that whenever you’re holding the sustained tone of your phrase or your word, you feel your body resonate with what the frequency and pitch of the sound that you’re holding.
Whenever you hold a tone in a lower frequency you’ll feel it down in your chest moving further down into your stomach. Whenever you hold that tone in a higher pitch, you’ll feel that vibration move up your chest and closer into your throat. I found that experimenting with different pitches during chanting, you can actually find a place within yourself- a particular pitch which feels like the right place to resonate for you. I would call that the resonant frequency of your individual body. So while you try chanting during your meditation, search upwards and downwards in pitch and pay attention to how the sound is resonating in your body and find that place in your body that’s resonating with that pitch that feels the most comfortable to you. Sometimes you can feel like you’re even touching on something, something you’d like to hold a vibration on and break free from your body. Now there is no specific ideal pitch and there is no specific ideal length of the time that you’re suppose to hold these tones whenever you’re chanting.
If chanting in a group, there’s no agreed upon pitch you should be chanting in with regard to anyone else. There is no rhythm or timing that you should be chanting in with relation to anyone else. You simply need to find your tone and inhale and chant as you breathe out, inhale and chant as you breathe out. Everyone in the group follows their own timing and their own pitch and that within itself creates a unique vibrational harmony within the group. A functionally useful aspect of chanting meditation is that it forces you to take deeper breaths and hold your exhales longer and inhale deeper- holding longer while you’re saying this phrase or word. Practicing this over time you’ll find that you’re taking larger deeper slower breathes with longer cleansing exhales. This creates an accordion or bagpipe pumping sort of effect where your lungs, chest and stomach are all expanding contracting, expanding a bit more, contracting a bit more, expanding a bit more and so on. Over time you’ll find that it helps you build a deeper, slower breath. Another aspect of chanting meditation is that by increasing the oxygen flow to your system by taking these deeper fuller breaths and holding long, vibrational based resonant sounds,
a sense of trance and intoxication comes over you during the practice. Personally, I feel that way for quite some time afterwards. One of the curious things I started to notice during my journey of meditation is that as I would sit down to meditate I would close my eyes continuing with my practice and whenever I was finished and opened my eyes, slowly, over time, the colors in the room began to seem brighter. The space seemed more clearly defined. Objects seemed to hold a different type of space in the room. Soon I began to realize what was happening. My meditation was getting deeper, my practice was getting better, and that my consciousness and awareness was actually expanding during the meditation practice. So whenever I opened my eyes after I was done with my practice, I could actually visually see the result of this increased awareness in my perception. Chanting meditation is an expressive way to experience that phenomenon. Although it may be fleeting, you can experience that phenomenon for a short period of time after your chanting meditation. This is a helpful thing to be able to observe, so in your regular meditation you can begin to notice, observe, and track that progress as well. There are some schools of meditation that say you need to pay for a mantra or you need someone else to give it to you for it to have validity. I couldn’t disagree with this more. There’s absolutely no reason to pay someone else to give you a mantra and someone else giving you a mantra certainly doesn’t energize it any more. What’s important is whenever you search to find a phrase, a word or some series of sounds that you’d like to repeat during your meditation is that it’s something that comes from within. It’s something that has some meaning to you, and whenever you say that word, phrase, or sound, you feel something personal resonate within yourself. It can be as simple as the word ‘om’ or as long and complex and dynamic as your imagination wants it to be, so long as it feels natural and you feel connected to the sound.
As I’ve noted throughout the course, meditation is a personal journey. It’s all about finding what works best for you, what has meaning for you, and what allows you to achieve your richest meditative experience. Another thing to experiment with during your chanting is how widely or tightly constricted your mouth and the back of your throat are. You’ll notice that while you’re chanting if you have your mouth very open or very closed, you’ll get a different sound. If you expand the back of your throat and move the position of your tongue or constrict the back of your throat, you’ll find that all of these things affect the sound of your chant and the feeling of the vibration. Experiment with these things and find what variation feels best for you. I personally find it most effective whenever I begin with my throat and mouth as wide as possible and over the course of one exhale, slowly and slightly constrict the width of the throat and how wide my mouth is open.
In the following guided meditation we’ll simply chant the word ‘om’ for the first half and through the beauty of audio technology, we’ll slowly begin to turn into a group chant by having other layers of my voice chanting ‘om’ in order to simulate what a group chanting session would be like.
Remember, it’s all about opening up, being free and allowing your body to resonate. So don’t be shy, allow the vibration of the sound to flow through your body, to help you open up, relax, release and focus even more deeply.